


Office Boy

by witling



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Character Death, M/M, Office Supplies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 07:33:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4737926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witling/pseuds/witling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto has gotten used to Jack dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Office Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short sniplet, rescued from LJ-land. From back in the day when Torchwood was a thing. Alas, poor Ianto.

Ianto has gotten used to Jack dying. It's not a pleasant process but he's had no choice, and at least (he tells himself) Jack comes back. Unlike Tosh and Owen, who died and stayed dead, Jack comes back.

This time, it was the stupidest thing--a traffic accident. They were chasing a Weevil on foot, at night, and Jack was hit by an SUV traveling fifty kilometers an hour. Ianto himself had stopped short at the side of the road, and he saw it happen. Jack's body was snapped like a branch. He left a long red streak down the macadam, and a dent in the SUV's bumper.

Like all Jack's deaths, it meant paperwork. There was the family in the SUV to calm and retcon, the other drivers who'd witnessed the event to track down, the insurance claims to bury, the repair work to arrange. You couldn't have a family waking up in Splott one morning and finding a huge bloody gouge in their car's front bumper, with no memory of how it got there. The road had to be closed for a very short while, and then of course the road crew had to be retconned. Ianto had done it all, while Gwen had gone after the Weevil. She'd missed it, in the end, but it wasn't fair to point fingers. They were used to having more agents, more expertise. More help.

Ianto handled the paperwork, got Jack loaded into a body bag, and arranged for it to be sent back to the Hub, to the autopsy. He told the EMT to unzip the head--he didn't tell her why. He couldn't very well say, _He doesn't like waking up inside closed bags._ Although by now he knows that to be true.

It's now close to two in the morning, and Ianto is back at the Hub himself, sitting on a metal stool in the infirmary next to Jack's gurney. Jack hasn't woken up yet. Ianto's drinking American bourbon from a glass, and he has a second glass ready. Waiting.

It occurs to him, in a vague and exhausted way, that someday he'll be the one in the bag, and Jack can wait for all eternity, can bring all the bourbon and clean clothes he wants, but Ianto will never rise from the dead. Ianto will be gone, finished. No more coffee, no more inventory forms. Like Owen, like Tosh, leaving the tools of their trades behind. It amuses him, without really amusing him at all, that his own trade is so mundane. He's an office boy who's shagging his boss. What a legacy he'll leave.

The bag rustles, and he turns to it, sees the slight movement of Jack's eyelashes that means he's about to wake up. There's still a bit of dried blood on the side of his face, but the great punched-in wound has closed up and disappeared. He looks asleep. He looks peaceful.

Ianto studies Jack's face, the inexplicably human shape of it, and tries to remember that Jack is not like the rest of them. Jack is a fixed point in space and time, a pole star around which everything rotates. It doesn't feel like that when he's kissing Ianto's throat, or pushing Ianto gently, firmly to his knees. A singularity shouldn't like blow jobs as much as Jack does. A quantum anomaly, or whatever Jack is, shouldn't be so kinky.

Jack's eyelids flutter and lift, and Ianto waits for him to focus, see the ceiling, and realize where he is again. For that first, explosive breath that tells him Jack's alive again, ready to start over.


End file.
